September 26, 1999

By DEREK BICKERTON

THE FORCE OF CHARACTER
And the Lasting Life. By James Hillman.
236 pp. New York:
Random House. $24.

ccording to popular wisdom, old age is dreadful unless you consider the alternative. But this cold comfort seems inadequate for a time in which the peak of the population curve drifts ever closer to the sere and yellow, and doomsayers predict for the young and middle-aged a future of ceaseless toil to support a geriatric majority. Such an era needs a more positive view of aging, and James Hillman, in ''The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life,'' aims to fulfill that demand.

Hillman, a leading Jungian psychologist with a long career as both author and academic, is far from your regular quick-fix self-help guru. He is widely read, steeped in the classics -- he quotes Yeats, Wallace Stevens, Henry Stafford and Robert Bly as readily as Plato, Nietzsche, Unamuno and Theophrastus of Lesbos. He writes a supple, persuasive prose with many vivid turns of phrase. Throughout, he seeks to replace negative stereotypes of old age with more positive approaches, even to aspects of aging usually seen as limitations or losses: reduced mobility, memory failure, sleeplessness, heart disease. But his main goal lies beyond these things. He wants to solve a problem that has baffled biologists for decades: Why are humans so long-lived? Why, if self-perpetuation is our selfish genes' sole objective, do we hang grimly on long after reproductive powers have waned or vanished?

His answer comes from a profound belief in the significance of character. He claims, as in a previous book, ''The Soul's Code,'' that each individual possesses a unique character that ripens throughout aging. In old age we gradually discover this essence of ourselves; we finally find time to make sense of the tangled web of our lives, to extract the single thread of who we really are.

So far, so good. But immediately doubts arise, focusing first on what is entailed by saying that age is ''for'' something. If age has a purpose, what gave it that purpose -- God, genes, the Life Force? Doesn't age merely provide opportunities for such voyages of self-discovery? (Opportunities seized by relatively few, one might add.) Hillman fails to explore issues of this kind. Indeed, he pointedly rejects scientific explanations. Every dozen pages or so, he ritually thwacks a biological-determinist straw man. Character, he assures us, simply does not lend itself to reductionist approaches.

But what exactly does Hillman mean by character? It's surprisingly hard to find out.

Character isn't our bodies or our minds; these change, but character doesn't. It isn't ''ego,'' ''self'' or ''identity,'' for these ''are bare abstractions, telling us nothing of the human being they supposedly inhabit and govern.'' It has nothing to do with ''occupation, age, gender, religion, nationality, income, I.Q., diagnosis.'' It's not strength of character la William Bennett; Hillman devotes a chapter (one that includes a whole page of praise for the characterological subtleties of astrology) to stripping the notion of character from the moralistic overtones imposed on it by the Victorians.

If character is anything at all, it seems to boil down to the sum of ''unique differences'' and ''individual oddities'' that each person exhibits. But does this sum constitute a unitary, unchanging entity? Here Hillman wavers. In old age, we have ''a longing for sameness'' but also ''a desire for freedom from the long-lasting patterns of life.'' Indeed, he himself admits that ''character is characters; our nature is a plural complexity.'' Perhaps all that unifies character is ''your idea of your character.'' But then who is the ''you'' that has that idea (or that character, if it comes to that)? We are exhorted to study character, yet the author never explains how one would set about studying anything so slippery and elusive.

If this book had no goal beyond fostering more positive approaches to aging, Hillman could be excused for skirting these deeper waters. Unfortunately his oracular tone, his quotations from famous thinkers and his dismissal of current trends in the behavioral sciences inevitably suggest he is presenting a coherent alternative to some contemporary, well-established and widely held psychobiological consensus, not just on the nature of aging but on the human nature that ages.

Of course there is no such consensus. Even if there were, challenging it would require more than polished rhetoric and judicious quotation. It would need explicit definitions, careful analyses, willingness to tackle awkward issues and, above all, logical and coherent arguments. These the book lacks; it is unashamedly nonlinear, a series of meditations linked only by their common theme. And though these meditations are at times poetic and occasionally revealing, Hillman falls equally often into overstatement, even self-contradiction.

At one point he declares that he is ''not suggesting simplistic conversions of body into mind, such as 'Clogged arteries are really blocked passions.' ''But three pages earlier he has done exactly that: ''Could these recurrent fears of acute heart failure reflect other, more chronic failures of the heart? Could heart troubles in later years also refer to a troubled heart?'' A long discussion of the human face as an index of character (and the consequent immorality of facelifts) leads to the astounding conclusion that ''the cover-up of the aging American face may be more the reason for ethical decay than the liberating movements of the 1960's.''

Hillman finds silver linings in every ill that age is heir to. Can't walk properly? This makes every step an adventure -- the adventure of slowness.'' Have trouble sleeping? You'll get to know Nyx, goddess of night. Irritable over trifles? You're really showing a ''vital sign,'' a ''display of the raw urge to live.'' Plagued by erotic fantasies? Don't worry. An ''enfeebled and lustless imagination'' would be much stronger evidence that you are past it. All this might prove less jarring if Hillman's high tone hadn't raised expectations of richer fare -- or at least, something more substantial than cheer-up messages by Pollyanna out of Candide.

Consequently, one is never sure on what level to take the book. What can one make of an author who believes that ''the biological clock 'intends' to rouse us elders from sleep''? What lies behind the bet-hedging quotation marks around ''intends''? As a new and provocative take on a topic many would rather avoid, Hillman's book has some value. But a definitive explanation of aging would require much more rigor.

Derek Bickerton's most recent book is ''Language and Human Behavior.'' His next, ''Lingua ex Machina'' (with William Calvin), will appear later this year.